The Paperchase (17 page)

Too indisposed to speak, I nodded weakly at him, and vomited again.

He lifted me up by the collar of my coat like a kitten, knocking my hat off in the process.

‘On your feet, man,’ said Mundy. Over my protestations, he marched me up the street and into a doorway some fifty yards from where I had been taken ill. I protested weakly, feeling like a condemned man on the trap waiting for the ground to drop away from my feet and to hear the snap of my own neck. Roughly, he bundled me inside the warehouse and dropped me on to a chair; then he left me.

My wits had deserted me. I sat mute in the darkness, gradually conscious of the rough boards beneath my feet and the smells of spice and river water that contended in the air. I did not think to run away: I could not see where I had come in. My mouth tasted foul, and my hands shook. I felt as weak as a baby.

I do not know how much later it was when Mundy returned and handed me a cup. ‘It’s been standing a while,’ he said. I drank the water gratefully while he wandered over to the window and lit a cheroot. ‘Better?’ said he.

I nodded and wiped my mouth, even though he could not have seen me in the darkness.

‘You young fellows,’ he said with a laugh. ‘All piss and swagger.’ I saw sparks fly from the floor as he dropped his smoke and ground out the coal with a boot heel. ‘Well, if you’re convalescing, young Holmes, I need to be on my way. I would drink no more today, if I were you.’

‘I’m not drunk, Abel,’ I said.

‘And I’m not Abel Mundy, neither,’ said he. ‘I could smell the drink on you.’

‘I’m not drunk, Abel,’ I said. ‘I’m sick with fear.’ He said nothing. ‘I mean to kill a man,’ I said, ‘and the fear of it sickens me.’

‘That’s a queer way to talk,’ he said quietly.

We sat silently in the darkness. The only sounds were the river
lapping
beneath us, and the rats rustling among the sacks and barrels.

‘Who is this man?’ he said finally. ‘Who is he, Holmes? What in God’s name are you talking about? You’re full of drink and you’re
babbling
, man. You’re talking nothing but nonsense.’ I could see him pacing in front of the window.

‘I mean to kill you, Abel Mundy. Turn your face to that window, or by heaven, I’ll shoot you dead,’ I said, drawing a brace of pistols from my greatcoat.

‘You, Holmes? A eunuch? A half-man, fit for the harem, to cook chocolate and dress dancing girls? Why, stow your nonsense, or I’ll break you like a twig.’ He stood stock-still, weighing up the odds against him, deliberating whether to charge me or to wait.

‘I assure you, you will find threatening me a singularly unfruitful course of action,’ I told him. ‘Now do as I say.’

‘What the devil?’ was the mildest of the volley of imprecations he uttered, but he did as I commanded.

I told him that unless he agreed to leave the country immediately I would take his life on the spot.

He turned suddenly and sprang. The flash of the pistol lit the darkness. I felt the heat of it across my hand. In the panic, the other weapon fell to the ground. Mundy lay in the darkness groaning. I found the second pistol and placed the muzzle behind his ear. With a huge effort, I pulled the trigger, but my efforts were rewarded with a click. The mechanism had broken in the fall.

Mundy dragged himself upwards with a groan and I felt his huge hands close on my ankle. I took up the chair on which I had been seated
and brought it crashing down on his skull. It felled him, but even then the man was so strong that he rose to his knees with a groan and grabbed at my hands. Again and again, I struck him with the chair with a kind of rising horror and pity, and a desperate wish that each blow would be the last of him. The chair by now having come apart, I was forced to belabour him with the parts of it, a chair leg, a spoke,
whatever
was left in my hands. He turned his face to me in the half-light as I struck savagely with the crude lumps of wood, black blood streaming from his nostrils and staining his teeth.

‘For Jesus’ sake, pity,’ he groaned.

‘Where was
your
pity, Abel Mundy? Where was
your
pity?’ And I beat him until he moved no longer, until I knew he was dead, and then for a while after, because of the terrible darkness inside me.

Afterwards, I fumbled through the pockets of his coat for his
cheroots
and matches. As I placed one between my lips, I tasted the blood on my fingers and a shiver went through me.

All my preparations had come to this. I had planned to offer him exile, but I had beaten him to death with a trick and his blood was all over me. And yet, until I said the words aloud I did not believe them myself:
I
mean
to
kill
you,
Abel
Mundy.
From that moment, all the fear left me and I knew I would succeed, because, for all his strength, my will was stronger.

About the warehouse were several empty barrels into one of which, with much effort, I forced Abel Mundy’s body. I had no means of sealing the barrel, and the corpse’s hand continually dropped out as I rolled it along the floor, until I no longer bothered to push it back inside, so that it lashed the dirty ground with every revolution of the cask. I was some time wondering how I could make the barrel sink, and I further knew that the gas building up inside the dead man would tend to raise him, barrel and all, to the surface, unless there were a counterweight sufficient to keep him down. I was fortunate, indeed, to find a great stack of lead blocks each marked for half a hundredweight and used for weighing cargo.

I rolled the barrel into a skiff that was among several kept by on the
wharf, and placed the blocks in after, as many as I could safely put in it, then fastened all with lengths of rope.

Fog had obscured the opposite bank and was closing fast, lessening my danger of being observed, but rendering my navigation more
perilous
. I took up the oars and rowed my cargo out to where I could see neither bank; here buoys were fixed in the deepest part of the river.

My ballast was so heavy that there was barely freeboard between the gunwales and the water, and I shipped a little water with each stroke. When I had reached what I took to be the centre of the river, I stove in the bottom of the skiff with a hatchet, until the river boiled up through it, sucking down the little boat and the barrel. The water was icy and dank, and all the harder to negotiate because of my heavy clothes and shoes. Having reached the farther bank, I struggled through the mud up to the nearest stairs, and as I reached out to steady myself on the stone, I saw my hands had been washed clean of blood, and with the
darkening
effect of the water on my clothes, it was impossible say which liquid was the Thames and which Abel Mundy.

I made my way home by back streets, and was helped by the weather, which had turned to rain and rendered my sodden attire less conspicuous.

Abel Mundy’s body was never found. Suspicion fell upon Mrs Mundy, but she claimed, with justification, that her husband’s
disappearance
was as much a mystery to her as to anyone else. By a circuitous coincidence, several months later my brother was employed by Abel Mundy’s insurers to ascertain whether or not the man was indeed dead. This was a kind of loss-adjusting work well suited to deductive reasoning which he frequently undertook, but which was of more significance to his finances than to his hagiographers.

I had continued at Fernshaw’s for a short while after, but found that I had lost the taste for combat. I grew lethargic and, after a while, ran to fat. An acquaintance from school had set me down for membership of the Diogenes Club, and I began to pass my evenings there, in the
panelled
silence of its library. It was here that I was summoned one evening
to receive two visitors in the only room of the club where talking was permitted.

My brother was there, along with his lumpen sidekick. He had come, it turned out, to seek my advice about the Mundy case.

‘I knew the fellow,’ I said, before he had gone beyond the details of the disappearance. ‘Boxed with him for a year or more.’

‘You … boxed?’ cried Watson, unable to conceal his surprise. I had, as I mentioned, run somewhat to fat.

‘Took a Blue, old boy. Don’t do it nowadays of course.’

‘A Blue! As did your brother.’ He made a note on a piece of paper which he had taken from his pocket.

‘My brother boxed, Mr Watson, but he did not take a Blue.’

My brother looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘What sort of a fellow was he?’

‘You should be able to tell me that yourself.’

‘Well, yes, of course. I merely meant to ask you for your opinion. Did he strike you as the type of chap who’d pull a jape like this? Disappearing into thin air.’

‘The police found blood and traces of a struggle, did they not?’ I said.

‘Blood, yes. But whose blood? The blood of what? He wouldn’t be foolish enough to disappear without an alibi. A clever criminal could have disposed of him without a trace of blood.’

‘If I understand you rightly, brother, the absence of blood you take as evidence of a murder. The presence of blood you take as proof that no murder happened. If your reasoning is correct, we must be
witnesses
to a massacre. Why, look at my hands!’ And I held up my fingers to him in the lamplight.

FINIS

I MUST HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP
in the armchair. It had carried on raining during the night and I was vaguely aware of drops drumming on the window. I found the noise consoling. I woke up when it seemed to begin again, this time louder. Gradually, it resolved into an insistent banging at the kitchen door.

The pages of Patrick’s stories were scattered around the armchair. I gathered them up quickly and put them on a high shelf. I assumed my visitor was Nathan, coming round to pick up the money I owed him.

Mrs Delamitri stood outside the kitchen door in a dazzling white jacket. It was already sunny and the light bounced off her clothes so that I had to squint to look at her. Seen in
silhouette
she looked like a quarterback, because of her huge
shoulderpads and the way she pressed her handbag along the inside of her left arm like a rugby ball.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she said.

I remembered the unsuccessful pass I had made at her on the beach. What had seemed spontaneous and feasible then, now felt like a moment of toe-curling embarrassment.

‘About the painting,’ she said. She pronounced it without the
t:
paining.
‘There’s no need to look so worried. Oh my God, Damien, did you think I wanted to go to bed with you? You did, didn’t you? Oh my. Go get dressed and I’ll make us both some coffee.’

She had a way with the recalcitrant kitchen that made me realise just how well she had known Patrick.

‘I was thinking it over,’ she said a little later, when I had changed and the coffee was made. ‘And do you know I thought that once you’ve left I probably won’t ever come here again. I wanted to have something – a memento. I’m sorry I came by so early, but I was afraid you might have already left.’

I told her not to worry about it. I couldn’t leave until I had got hold of a new passport. I mentioned that I had found some stories that Patrick had been working on.

‘Stories? By Patrick?’ She couldn’t have looked more excited if I’d told her I’d found fragments of the true cross in the attic. There was a fervour in her voice – almost a tone of veneration. ‘Where were they?’

‘In one of the boxes.’

‘I’d love to see them,’ she said.

‘They’re in a very rough state.’ I was reluctant to let her see the manuscript. I had found the implications of the final story too unsettling. There was something obsessive about the
violence
in it, as though Patrick had been trying to write one story but in spite of himself had written another.

‘Damien, this is so exciting.’ She put her cup down so quickly that a little of the coffee slopped on to the table. She didn’t notice. ‘Where are they?’

‘I took them into town to have them copied.’ I looked at my
watch. It was half past nine. ‘Just got back about twenty
minutes
ago.’

‘You left an original manuscript at a copy shop in Westwich? Oh, Damien. Was that smart?’

I tried to reassure her. ‘They’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I gave them to Mr Diaz to copy. There’s no way he’ll lose them.’

‘For a moment, I thought you’d just dumped them at some Korean grocery shop,’ she said. ‘What a relief.’

I told her I’d had trouble reading Patrick’s handwriting so I didn’t know what the stories were about. Her surprise was
genuine
, I decided. I don’t think she had any idea that he had been working on the Mycroft stories.

She took the painting and began talking about the friend she was staying with up at the War Bonnet Cliffs. She said she was a sculptor, and began describing how she used driftwood that she collected from the beach.

I found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. The coffee had revived me, but my thoughts were all about my uncle’s strange story.

The tone was strangely confused – after a dark opening, it had reverted to jokes and soft pornography. But an unsettling mood had come over it with the arrival of Abel Mundy. It was a different atmosphere from the previous stories – the darkest they’d got was a kind of melancholy, the wistfulness of a
self-described
failure looking back on his life with regretful humour. This was something else: vengeful, active. It was almost as though there was too much anger for one character to contain. Mundy’s violence seemed to infect Mycroft, and by implication, Patrick. I thought about what Mrs Delamitri had said about Patrick’s baseless guilt. ‘There was always this
feeling
that he’d done something awful.’

I began to wish Mrs Delamitri would go away so that I could reread the story and consider what I had found upsetting about it.

‘It’s a quality the light has here, apparently,’ she was saying as she stood gazing out of the window over the garden.
‘She came out here from Wisconsin and just fell in love with it.’

The detail that stood out for me was the deaf family. Although they had been transposed in time and place and
re-upholstered
as a different ethnic group, I felt they were still recognisably my neighbours, the Fernshaws. It wasn’t just the deafness. The sexes and relative ages of the children were the same in both families as well. It meant Abel Mundy might be a portrait of their father.

‘… built up in layers of impasto on scrunched-up
newspaper
. They’d make lovely gifts.’

‘You know the Fernshaws, don’t you,’ I said.

‘Excuse me?’ Mrs Delamitri turned round from the window and let the lace drape fall back across the glass.

‘You told Nathan to say hi to his sister.’

‘Oh, sure. I met them a couple of times. They seemed like nice kids. Patrick got close to them after their father died. The girl is beautiful. She’d be more your type, Damien. Closer to your age, too.’

‘She’s got a boyfriend,’ I said.

‘Really? What’s he like?’

‘He’s an academic. Name’s Michael. Quite a bit older than her.’

‘That figures,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Oh, the old cliché about looking for a father figure, I guess.’

I refilled the kettle from the tap. ‘What happened to her actual father?’

‘Don’t quote me on this, Damien, but I believe he drowned.’

Mrs Delamitri left before lunch. The pistols were in the chest of looted possessions that I had stored up in the attic. I wasn’t sure what I hoped to learn from them, but I found myself examining them again closely. They did look like murder weapons. That was what I had found unpleasant about them in the first place. They had the same grubbily practical quality as
the objects in Ziploc bags that attorneys brandish in
courtrooms
. They were cruel and ordinary – like a pair of bread knives, or screwdrivers, like the chair legs Mycroft uses to finish off Abel Mundy.

Nothing in the previous stories had prepared me for the
violence
Mycroft unleashed on the wounded man. It was completely unexpected. It also seemed unnecessary. Surely Mycroft the egghead could have come up with a more elegant way of disposing of his man than bashing his brains out with a lump of wood?

I cocked and fired the faulty pistol. Still no click. Had it been damaged in a fall? Rust seemed a more likely answer. And who in their right mind would plan to carry out a murder with an unreliable antique? I told myself it was a prop from the
costume
box, not an exhibit in a murder trial.

I found it hard to admit to myself what the story made me think.

Mycroft had said he was offering Mundy a choice: if Mundy left the country, he wouldn’t kill him. But the more I reread the story, the less the offer seemed sincere. Mycroft had planned to kill him all along. And the sinister part was that he seemed to enjoy it. He was thrilled by the taste of the dead man’s blood. By comparison, the account of disposing of the body was totally dispassionate. It had a weird detachment, as though it were written by a character in shock.

Down in the basement, Patrick had saved copies of his rage-filled letters like trophies, like so many scalps that he’d taken from his victims. And to Patrick each of them
represented
a wrong righted, a humbug exposed, a slight avenged. Mycroft would undoubtedly have approved. He was everything Patrick felt about himself, raised to heroic size: the neglected genius, the avenging angel, the scourge of the powerful, the mould-breaking intellectual. And when Patrick was in a manic, morally indignant frame of mind, he shared Mycroft’s
confidence
that no problem was so complex that it wouldn’t benefit from his interference.

And even the more low-key Mycroft recalling his adventures in old age bore similarities to my uncle: the erudition, the reflective melancholy, the obssession with success and failure, the hinted-at burden of guilt.

But Mycroft was a murderer.